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Pastimes : THE SLIGHTLY MODERATED BOXING RING -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (17421)	7/13/2002 9:05:36 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21057

Do you have any ideas? One answer is gov't-sponsored research. Of course, it is to be expected that the drug companies would put pressure on the gov't not to fund research they don't want done. Another is private foundations. They should often be harder to influence. And then there's the case that was on 60 Minutes (?) about a week ago- -a kid that had a very rare genetic disease that only about 40 people in the US contract each year- -an "orphan" disease. The kid could only expect to live to 10. No drug company was interested because there were so few potential patients. The cause of the disease was that the kid's body did not make an enzyme needed to degrade a waste produce. A university researcher had the idea that injecting the missing enzyme would alleviate the disease- -but he could noy get money to do the necessary development and research. The kid's father refused to accept that his son would die. He heard of the researcher and started raising money to support the research. He raised about $1,000,000. It was enough, trials were done on a number of patients (including his son) and they worked. So maybe bake sales are the solution. :-) This phenomenon always amazes me: -minocycline significantly reduced joint swelling and tenderness in more than half of patients, although a dummy pill caused similar improvement in about 40 percent.- So the minocycline was only 11 or 12 percent more effective than a placebo! And the striking thing is that the placebo wasn't only effective for "tenderness," which is a subjective symptom, but also for "joint swelling," which was presumably measured objectively. Sort of amazes me. And yet we know that, in spite of a persistent belief that mind and body are separate, they are not. The mind is what the brain does. The brain is just another organ. It makes sense that it is influenced by and influences other organs and affects body chemistry. Just like every other organ.